The perpetrators of the
Rwanda genocide were “programmed” by a relatively small number of individuals,
a prosecutor with the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
told a local audience yesterday.

Barbara Mulvaney, a
former Los Angeles County deputy district attorney, yesterday joined Pepperdine
University professor and international security expert Dan Caldwell on a panel
entitled “Genocide and Religion: Collective Resistance.”

The discussion was part
of the Genocide and Religion conference which took place at the university the
last three days, co-sponsored by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Pepperdine’s
Institute on Law, Religion and Ethics.

Mulvaney, a senior trial
attorney currently prosecuting members of the Rwandan military in a trial that
began in 2002 and is scheduled to end this year, defended the tribunal’s
decision to charge only 66 defendants with responsibility for the killing of an
estimated 800,000 Rwandans. Most of those killed were members of the Tutsi
minority, but thousands of majority Hutus who opposed the genocide were also
among its victims.

Those killings took
place over a space of about 100 days, beginning in April 1994.

The tribunal, based in
Arusha, Tanzania, is necessary, she said, because there was no alternative way
of bringing the perpetrators to justice. When she went to Rwanda to interview survivors,
she said, she was told that “had we not meet there, no one would have been held
accountable,” in part because “the vast majority of their lawyers and judges
had been killed.”

Mulvaney described her
early days with the tribunal, interviewing witnesses by day and watching
recordings of the genocide at night. The “man with the machete in his hands,”
she said, was generally a person with little knowledge of the world who was
acting at the behest of Hutu extremists in the media, the military, and the Christian
clergy.

Prosecuting the military
defendants for the planning and execution of the genocide, which took place
over a period of four years, has been an overwhelming experience at times,
Mulvaney said. She recounted how she and and her team were ordered to pare
their original list of 800 witnesses—which she acknowledged had to be whittled
down, otherwise the trial “would take forever”—to 100.

One of the things that
has distinguished the case from other war crimes trials, she explained, is that
the defendants are charged with using “sexual violence and rape as a tool of
genocide.” She explained how she was able to qualify an expert to explain why
the defendants encouraged the rape of thousands of women, many of whom were
killed afterwards, as part of their effort to annihilate the Tutsi people.

She quoted Gen. Romeo
Dellaire, the Canadian who led the United Nations Assistance Mission for
Rwanda, as writing that amidst all of the horrors, “the hardest thing to
witness was the sexual violence against the women.” She also cited Dellaire’s
aide, Brent Beardsley, who gave graphic testimony at the trial and quoted the
general as saying: “The massacres kill the body, but rape kills the soul.”

The “good news,”
Mulvaney told the conference, is that “all of you are part of the collective
resistance to genocide.” What people of good will need to do, she said, is to
be sensitive to the signs of aggression in the making, including “people being
demonized” by “hate media.”

She praised the group
Human Rights Watch, and in particular one of its Africa experts, Allison
DeForge, who testified for 30 days about the history of the Hutu-Tutsi
conflict. DeForge, Mulvaney explained, testified about events occurring as
early as 1990, including “dress rehearsal massacres” that would have alerted
the world and perhaps drawn an international response had they not occurred in
a country with “no resources,” one that few were aware of even after the
genocide, at least until the movie “Hotel Rwanda” reached movie screens.

Mulvaney expressed
reservations about the International Criminal Court, which some of the other
conference participants support but which the United States has thus far
declined to join, citing the possibility that it could be used to prosecute
American soldiers.

International tribunals
such as the UNICTR, she explained, while they include lawyers and judges from
many countries, have adopted a “style of law” similar to what Americans are
used to. A civil law model, in which witnesses are interviewed by an investigating
judge who prepares a transcript of their testimony for possible use at trial
may be better suited to war crimes cases, she said.